


To Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: Worldbuilding

by BloodyMary, OphisPeleia



Series: Forbears of what will be [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends (Dark Horse Comics), Star Wars Legends: Dawn of the Jedi (Comics)
Genre: I'm terrible at fiction writing so this is how I contribute, Meta, My ongoing love affair with bullet points, Worldbuilding, Worldbuilding June 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-13 19:16:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 15,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11191647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BloodyMary/pseuds/BloodyMary, https://archiveofourown.org/users/OphisPeleia/pseuds/OphisPeleia
Summary: Our version of the GFFA, circa 26,000 BBY. Mirrored from tumblr. I've tried to keep these pieces low on spoilers, but I make no guarantees. (This is a meta dump and can be read out of order or not at all; the next story in the series is "yet keep love's substance whole" if you'd like to skip to that.)





	1. Intro

As I’ve said elsewhere, every month is Worldbuilding June here at Forbears-verse HQ, but what the hell, why not?

  * Our time period is about 26,000 years before the movies, so if you’re looking for the characters and settings you’re familiar with from there, no luck. (Although we do like to imagine how our lot would react to being dropped into the prequel era in particular; perhaps one day we’ll do something organized with that.)
  * If you’re familiar with Star Wars: The Old Republic, our setting will be a little more recognizable; our story begins on Tython in the time of the four Jedi Founders. (Only two of them actually got the chance to appear in the DotJ comic, so…well, we had some fun with all of them, but especially the two we had to build from scratch.)
  * Tweaks have been made in the name of reconciling the now-Legends comic with the new canon, including changing some characters’ species to ones we’re sure are still canonical, as well as eventually working in some of the new canon’s origin story for the Jedi (whatever it ends up being, but we’re already making plans for Ahch-to).
  * The official point of departure for the AU is that Daegen Lok never fell to the Dark Side, instead retreating to the Silent Desert to sort himself out after having his vision, but…that’s not quite it. In light of some of the other tweaks, really, it’s that the galaxy is a kinder, gentler place that produced a less-damaged Daegen, who was then able to handle his vision better.
  * Not that our galaxy is devoid of darkness and horror, either. The Rakatan Infinite Empire is at its zenith, after all, and they’re providing as much horror as you please.
  * Lightsabers have just been invented, and the early chapters see them popularized among the pre-Jedi; hyperdrives are restricted to the Rakata just now, and anyone looking to build their own will probably want to find an alternate fuel source besides, er, scores of Force-sensitive slaves hooked up to life-draining machines. (I told you the Rakata were horrible.)
  * The general tech level is closer to a near-future setting than is typical for SW. Look, at this time depth, they ought to be in the Stone Age, so cut us some slack here.



So. Welcome to Forbears-verse. Come play with us.


	2. Geography

Geography, huh? I guess that means it’s time to talk about the Tythos system (look, we’re not responsible for these names), since that’s where most of the fun happens. So, the planets in order from Tythos outwards:

  * **Sunspot** : Like a hotter, tinier Mercury. Can’t do much with it. (Canon has some mining operations happening there, but we decided against that.)
  * **Malterra** : A lot like Sunspot, but not quite as hot or as tiny. There are some mining operations, largely funded and administered by Nox; droids may do the mining, but then someone has to service the droids, which is an unpleasant but (most of the time) thankfully short assignment.
  * **Nox** : The first of the properly inhabited planets. Not originally habitable and imperfectly terraformed, and still too hot and toxic to do much farming, but the city-domes of Nox are the system’s main industrial centers. (I think canon intended for the nastiness of the environment to be a consequence of all the heavy industry rather than something preexisting, but that seemed unsatisfying. I’m a little tired of almost every planet in SW being either perfectly Earthlike, barring some cosmetic quirks, or an airless rockball.)
  * **Krev Coeur** : Mainly notable for crystals. Lots and lots of crystals. Think Ilum with a temperate climate and way the hell more crystals. The presence of that much kyber in one place gives it one hell of a vibe in the Force (and remember, the system’s entire founding population was Force-sensitive), which has made it a popular pilgrimage site, though you also get tourists who don’t much care for the spiritual side and just want to gawk at the pretty.
  * **Tython** : Ah, home. A lot like Earth, but way more dangerous; pretty much everything there wants to eat you and/or eliminate you as a threat, and quite a lot of the creatures in question are some combination of huge, venomous, permanently on fire (we didn’t even make that one up!), or something else terrifying. (We’re only slightly joking when we call it Magic Space Australia.) Luckily, they tend to respond well to the Force, and while our Tython isn’t quite the no-go zone for Force-blind people that it is in canon, it’s close. (We didn’t go with the inhabitants causing Force storms by being out of balance, either; our analysis of how the Force works didn’t really mesh well with that, and it’s treated really inconsistently by the comic anyway.)
  * **Kalimahr** : The sane, peaceful, and therefore boring one. (Ha ha, only serious.) A lot like Tython, only much less dangerous, and originally settled by Tythonians looking for a nice, quiet place to avoid getting eaten.
  * **Shikaakwa** : Another pretty Earthlike world (you can see why I wanted to break from the pattern with Nox), though the terrain is more rugged and less eminently farmable than that of Tython or Kalimahr.
  * **Ska Gora** : Now here’s a more interesting one. The surface is largely (though not entirely) taken up with apex-tree forests. The trees are economically as well as ecologically important and do best when left well alone, so most of the inhabitants live in city-ships floating in the sky. There are some tribes of Wookiees living on the surface who make their living tending sections of forest, though most of the forestry is done by urban Ska Gorans who come down from the city-ships to work.
  * **Obri and Mawr** : A pair of gas giants, because every respectable solar system needs some. Each one has a handful of marginally habitable rocky moons, where a few thousand colonists have settled to handle gas mining in the planets’ atmospheres and mineral and other resource extraction operations on the moons themselves. Not a place to go if you like the comforts of civilization.
  * **Furies Gate** : I once referred to Furies Gate as “Space Pluto” before realizing that Pluto is, in fact, in space. Oops. But it totally fits. A remote little iceball that’s home to two science outposts (one in orbit and one on the surface) and not much else. There may not be much living there, but the wildlife it does have will absolutely fuck you up good if you’re not careful.




	3. People and Races

Look. It’s Star Wars. You’ve got your humans and your twi'leks and your wookiees and all the rest of the usual lot. But there were still a few things for us to do here:

  * One of the common species in the comic is the **Red Sith**. Thing is, they’re of uncertain canonicity right now (the Massassi name is canon, but we haven’t yet seen who or what it refers to). Ergo, the decision was made to replace them with another humanoid-with-extra-bits species that comes in red: they’re all Togruta now. (Side effect: The characters in question are now significantly prettier. Sith are a little weird-looking.)
  * **Yoda’s species** has deliberately been kept mysterious in canon, but we’re under no such obligations. Here, they’re the indigenous population of Tython, never terribly numerous but uniformly strong with the Force.
  * The comic’s **Dathomirians** are humans (mostly redheaded or brunette) with green triangle tattoos. New canon’s Dathomirians, as seen in TCW…aren’t. And since our only potential reference for male Dathomirians is Maul and the other Nightbrothers as seen in TCW, and canon can’t seem to decide whether they’re zabraks or Dathomirians or if those are still some kind of continuum like they were in late-stage Legends, we kind of had to pull the appearance of our male Dathomirians out of our asses. (For the record, they basically look like white-skinned zabraks with the Darth Maul-type horn pattern, where there are horns all the way around the head, and facial tattoos in the style of the Nightsisters.)




	4. History

For today’s prompt, we’re going to rewind about ten years from the beginning of our story and talk about the Despot War, aka the Hadiya Incident.

  * Shikaakwa’s feudal monarchy is held together by family ties and personal loyalties, so when it breaks down, it breaks down spectacularly.
  * So when despot Tiger Ryo started losing support to a loose coalition led by a promising young army major named Hadiya, it soon became a planetwide civil war.
  * She had the old Tiger murdered, along with his eldest son the Stallion, because really, why wouldn’t you in her position? (The Stallion was exactly the sort of person you’d think would have that nickname and wasn’t much missed, but his being the heir meant it was still an issue.)
  * The Tiger had two other sons, though. The Hawk, the youngest, was imprisoned on Bogan and in no position to affect anything, but middle son the Ox was absolutely not going down without a fight. (The Ox was physically imposing but bookish and hadn’t been groomed for the throne from birth the way his older brother had, so underestimating him was almost understandable. Not smart, but understandable.)
  * Now, a decade and some before, the Ox had married Kora, a historian from Tython and a rising star in the Temple of Knowledge there; she wasn’t the Temple Master yet, but it was already looking pretty good for her.
  * Marriage alliances are a big part of how things get done on Shikaakwa, so when things were getting desperate, the Ox naturally called on his “in-laws” on the Tythonian ruling council to help.
  * They normally would’ve been less than inclined to interfere in another planet’s internal politics, but the war was causing a humanitarian crisis and threatening to destabilize the whole system. Plus Hadiya was starting to make noises about going to war with Tython once she was in power, which didn’t help her case any.
  * So since Hadiya herself was the main thing holding her supporters together, it was decided to send an agent to assassinate her. Specifically, Master Daegen Lok of the Temple of Science: inventor of the mind trick, capable fighter, son of Shikaakwan émigrés (and so better able to navigate the social landscape than the average Tythonian), and handsome enough to play on her weakness for human men and insinuate himself into her bed, where she would be at his mercy. (His being gay and in a relationship didn’t really factor in, nor his having come to admire her even as he understood why she needed to be eliminated.)
  * It worked like a charm. But now the Ox owed his throne to his wife’s Tythonian compatriots, which didn’t sit well with some of his supporters. As a concession to them to avoid being on the business end of another coup attempt so soon after the last one, he divorced Kora and repudiated her and their daughter entirely, leaving them to their lives on Tython. There’s been pressure on the Ox to remarry, especially as he gets older and the question of the succession becomes more urgent, but he isn’t having it. He’d much rather father a bastard somewhere to have an heir without giving any of the families at court the huge power upgrade of being the despot’s in-laws. So they’re all trying to position their pretty daughters to get noticed as potential royal mistresses instead. Everyone wins! No, wait, not wins, the other thing.




	5. Civilization and Architecture

Tython is a pretty standard settled planet: it’s got farming communities, ports, communications centers, and all the rest. But perhaps the most spectacular feature of the landscape is the Temples.

  * The Temples are nine [arcologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) scattered over the planet, each with a different specialty. Each one is led by a Temple Master, who sits on the Council that governs Tython. (The current Council has ten members, not nine, since one of the Temples is run jointly by a couple. More on them on the 8th, when it’s time for politics.)
  * In size and complexity, each Temple is somewhere between a particularly large university and a fairly respectable city. When we say “Temple”, think something like the movie-era Jedi temple, only more so. And, you know, nine of them.
  * Because each Temple is specialized, going into a different field from your parents can mean living on a different continent. And since the Temples and Tython in general provide the best opportunities for Force-sensitives in the entire Tythos system, there are also a lot of people, mostly children but the occasional teenager or even adult, moving to Tython to study, and most of them do end up settling there permanently. All this adds up to people being separated from their families of origin on the regular, so adoptions and fictive kinship are the norm. (So yes, that twi'lek and that human are actually brother and sister, ever since he was shipped over from Kalimahr as a child and placed with her family. And you’d better believe those Dathomirians take their relationship with their Togruta Temple-brethren as seriously as with any of their own kin.)
  * Part of the educational system in the Temples is the Great Journey, where older adolescents who’ve completed their basic education make the rounds of all nine Temples, taking classes and making contacts at each one. It teaches independence, broadens their horizons, and pretty much everyone comes away from it with a few good “no shit, there I was” stories. (For similar reasons, Mastery, roughly equivalent to a real-world graduate degree, is only granted after you’ve spent five years with the Rangers, Tython’s law enforcement and humanitarian aid force, which sees its members sent to deal with situations in every corner of the system.)



The list:  


  * **Akar Kesh** , the Temple of Philosophy. Functionally the seat of government; the Council chamber and Ranger headquarters are both here. Also known for its gardens. A placid, minimalistically-designed place. The philosophers like it that way.
  * **Anil Kesh** , the Temple of Science. Pretty much what it says on the tin, to be honest. As in canon, it’s housed in a multi-legged structure straddling an enormous rift valley called the Chasm, which is so deep, and the terrain so rugged, that even now it’s yet to be fully explored. The Chasm and the ridiculously powerful laser apparatus used for gathering data on it are the subject of quite a few ribald jokes.
  * **Bodhi** , the Temple of the Arts. Pretty much anything related to design or artistic expression happens here. Colorful, with lots of open space.
  * **Mahara Kesh** , the Temple of Healing. There are healer stations everywhere on Tython, of course, but medical research, experimental treatments, healer training, and the like are the preserve of Mahara Kesh. The Temple is on the ocean, much of it submerged, and the location makes it extremely popular with the Selkath population; even those with no interest in medicine often take support positions there.
  * **Kaleth** , the Temple of Knowledge. The biggest, most complete library on Tython, plus studies in history and the social sciences. Perhaps a bit more fortress-like than you might expect, given its function, but then a lot of the antiquities and documents stored there are invaluable.
  * **Padawan Kesh** , the Temple of Enlightenment. They handle teacher training and educational theory, as well as operating a boarding school for young Force-sensitives and providing orientation for new arrivals from off-world. The white walls and gold domed roofs cut quite a figure.
  * **Stav Kesh** , the Temple of Martial Arts. Home to the military, the martial artists, and the theorists of warfare. Carved pretty deep into the mountains of the Ice Giant range, and brightly painted on the inside to liven up the drab native stone. (The continent it’s canonically on is called Kato Zakar; fellow Greek speakers will understand why my first response to this was to wonder where Ano Zakar was.)
  * **Qigong Kesh** , the Temple of Force Skills. These guys do theory of how the Force works as well as practical applications of it. Largely underground, since the sound-cancelling quality of the desert is kind of a pain for daily life, though it does provide solitude for contemplation as well as incentive to practice your telepathy. **Adyton** , the House of Visions, where Tythonians who have Force visions of the future will be housed together during crises in order to make the visions come more often and ease the process of collating and interpreting them, is an outbuilding of Qigong Kesh, supplied and administered from the main temple. There’s also a hermit outreach office to keep an eye on those who’ve gone off into the desert alone for solitary contemplation.
  * **Vur Tepe** , the Forge. Engineering, manufacturing, and pretty much anything technological happen here. Built over a volcano, because hey, geothermal energy! Or something! (Also it looks really cool, and hey, the place hasn’t been taken out by an eruption yet.)




	6. Gender and Sexuality

Since SW is a multi-species setting, we’d be remiss in our duties if there weren’t a wide variety of ways different groups do gender, families, reproduction, and all the rest. (Ahem, canon.)

Tython is a **planet of empaths** , thanks to nearly everyone there being Force-sensitive. So:  


  * Gender and orientation are recognized as broad and continuous spectra.
  * Tythonians have no reason not to respect each other’s identities, both in terms of “you are what you say you are” and “your identity doesn’t affect your worth as a sentient being”.
  * As far as physical transitioning goes, Mahara Kesh is pretty well kitted out to help.



The **Togruta** population in particular has their own way of doing things:  


  * The basic unit isn’t a couple, but a band of anywhere from three to a dozen. Then you have parents and their band, grandparents and their band, and so on, plus children who haven’t moved out yet. Family structures are looser on Tython due to people moving around and being separated from their families a lot, but multigenerational extended families are very much the tradition.
  * Children of one band member are children of every band member, at least socially. You keep track of who your birth parents are for academic interest and to avoid sleeping with close genetic relatives, but the people most involved in raising you might be someone else entirely. (One of our main cast is a young Togruta whose birth parents are off-planet with the diplomatic service, but you’d never know it, because he was raised largely by their bandmates and assorted other relatives. He had plenty of parents growing up.)
  * When you meet someone nice and want to get really serious, you bring them home to join your band. Band members mostly live together, so the commitment level is somewhere between moving in together and getting married.
  * It’s one thing to decide collectively that your band doesn’t have the time or space or resources for any new members right now, but declaring yourselves officially closed and looking at anyone else to be Wrong and Bad and Cheating would be weird. (People are known to do weird things sometimes, of course.)
  * Sleeping around outside your band on the regular is…perhaps more common and accepted than real-world polyamory but viewed largely the same way: Sounds like a headache to keep track of everything, but if everyone involved is OK with it, sure, good for them.
  * If you and your band aren’t that way inclined, there’s still generally no need to worry about one of your bandmates falling for someone else, because they’ll just bring the person home and you’ll get to know them and/or possibly get a turn with them yourself. But keeping someone on the side, separate from your band? That’s kind of selfish and antisocial and probably the closest thing to “cheating” the way monogamists would understand it.
  * When you bring home a new band member, they’re now bandmates with everyone there, not just you. If they eventually end up more attached to someone else than to you, well, shifting attachments are a thing that happens. You’ve probably been strengthening your other bonds within the band as well.



The **Tythan indigenes** , aka **Yoda’s species** , are a little different in these respects as well:  


  * They’re egg-layers, closer to reptiles than mammals. The risk of eggs being damaged or eaten doesn’t help their already-low birth rate, though they’ve managed so far.
  * They live for a really, really long time (Yoda was active and vigorous well into his 800s, remember), of which only a small fraction is spent on child-rearing.
  * They have no concept of romantic relationships and think us mammals rather weird for gluing ourselves to our mates the way we do. I mean, sure, find someone you get along with to co-parent with you, but once the child is grown you’ve got your whole life to live.
  * Sexual dimorphism is much less marked than in most other sentient species.
  * They have genders (we meet one woman and one agender Tythan over the course of the story), but it’s just not a huge deal the way it is for some other species.



Meanwhile, elsewhere in the galaxy, the **Rakata** are off doing their thing:  


  * These guys are another egg-laying species. Clutches typically number about half a dozen, but only one or two of the hatchlings usually survive. Because they ate all their clutchmates. Yum.
  * They’re patriarchal as all hell, because of course they are. Women can be influential behind the scenes or step into the place of a deceased husband, but you won’t see them actually appointed to positions of power.
  * High-ranking men will have a number of wives and concubines. It’s all about strength in Rakatan society, and the right ancestry and/or the will to claw your way up that high mean you’re good stock and should get all the women so you can make all the babies.
  * On a similar note, men have to take the time to prove themselves before they start taking wives. Which means a lot of single young men in low-ranking military officerships and remote administrative positions. The dangerous conditions help thin out some of the surplus, too.
  * Those wives and concubines are expected to be 100% faithful to their husbands. In-story, we see one go on a murder spree rather than get caught cheating, eliminating her husband, the other man, and a concubine who had found them out.
  * Gender? Sexual orientation? Yeah, no one cares. Just get married and make some babies already. (Though that also means that as long as you’re keeping up your marriage/baby-making obligations, you won’t get too much stick for it; certainly no Victorian sodomy laws here.)




	7. Economy

I have to say, economics aren’t really one of the more thoroughly considered parts of this ‘verse. It just…hasn’t really come up. That said:

  * There are well-developed **money economies** throughout the Tythos system. It’d probably be hard to run things any other way unless you’re post-scarcity, which they aren’t.
  * Most of the settled planets have robust **welfare states**. Tython is a planet of empaths, remember, and has a peculiarly communal society going on in the Temples. Nox and Ska Gora have everyone stuck with each other in their domes/ships, plus the Noxian corporations would like to retain their workers and keep them happy and productive, thank you kindly. And Kalimahr prides itself on being a peaceful and happy sort of place, which cutting down on poverty and the social strife it causes goes a long way towards maintaining.
  * The Shikaakwan government is a bit of a mess, mostly good for sanctioning whatever those in power were going to do anyway. Their society is all about family, though, and Shikaakwan families do **take care of their own**. On the third tentacle, that does mean that anyone without a family, whether due to death, migration, disowning, or some other factor, is left with nowhere to turn. It doesn’t help the crime rate any, that’s for certain.



On an interplanetary level:  


  * **Nox** has the best-developed industry and controls pretty much all the inner-system mining but needs to import most of its food. (Nothing edible grows outside the domes, and hydroponics and rendering the bodies of their dead for protein and water can only get them so far. Yes, Noxians get plenty of stick from the other planets for eating people.)
  * **Tython** and **Kalimahr** have some great farming terrain and are hands down the biggest food exporters.
  * **Shikaakwans** are mainly known as traders and shipbuilders. Some of their most active shipyards are in the lunar colonies, close to the fuel and ore refineries there.
  * **Ska Gora** has products made from the fruit and sap of the apex trees, but with the city-ships so cramped and the surface off-limits, manufacturing is largely limited to facilities on their moon or in the colonies.



Over in the Infinite Empire:  


  * The Rakata have a **command economy** , where citizens are assigned work and issued necessities. This extends to the point of ordinary citizens not having kitchens in their homes because they’re expected to be fed at communal eateries, or not being expected to clean their homes or watch their own children because there are government services for that too. There’s something to be said for the level of skill and efficiency that can be gained by hyperspecializing, but…what’s self-sufficiency? Can I eat it?
  * And yes, the employees of all these government services are **spying** and informing on you. What are you, new?
  * Trade is largely facilitated by **personal deals** between high-ranking Rakata.
  * Menial or labor-intensive tasks are mostly done by **slaves** , and big projects such as public works and infrastructure just get lots and lots of slaves thrown at them. Having people to do things for you is perhaps the main marker of status in Rakatan society and something everyone is meant to aspire to, so there’s little incentive to invest in labor-saving technology.




	8. Hierarchy, Power, and Governance

I see today is politics day. This part actually does come up in-story, especially as the Rakatan invasion looms and the different planetary governments actually have to _work together_. The horror. Just imagine.  


  * **Nox** doesn’t have a government per se so much as a group of large corporations operating and maintaining its domed cities. The hostility of the Noxian environment means there’s a very real, immediate sense of “if we don’t all work together and keep things running smoothly, we’re all going to die”, so they mostly behave themselves.
  * **Tython** has its Temples, the leaders of which form the Council. Most of the time they’re home in their respective Temples dealing with local issues, but when there’s something big to deal with that affects the whole planet, they all travel to Akar Kesh to meet in person. The Master of Akar Kesh is the primus inter pares, if you will, but he (it’s a he right now, and so was the previous one, but there have been others in the past and will be others in the future) isn’t accorded more importance than any of the others, and decisions are made by consensus. Temple Masters are picked by the rest of the Council from a shortlist submitted by the Temple in question, and their fellow Councillors can also remove them if they’re really causing problems; the Masters of Akar Kesh and Bodhi had to be shown the door not long before our story begins for agitating to get Force-blind Tythonians stripped of some of their citizen rights.
  * **Kalimahr** has the most unified planetary government in the system, a republic of a sort that would be quite familiar to modern-day Europeans or Americans.
  * **Shikaakwa** is a feudal monarchy that runs on personal and family loyalties. (There’s no idea of the divine right of kings or anything; the despot is whoever has enough support to proclaim themselves the despot and not have someone else violently contradict them. At this point in history, that’s been several generations of the Ryo family, but it got a little rough for them there with Hadiya’s attempt at a coup a decade back.) Governing effectively means getting the other noble families on board through concessions or outright bribery, as even the despot themself has little power outside their family holdings. That means rampant corruption and no safety net aside from what families can do for their own, but it…mostly works. Right up until it doesn’t.
  * **Ska Gora’s** city-ships each run their own affairs, but they get along well enough to present a united front on the interplanetary diplomatic scene, whereas Nox does no such thing. Life on the ships is an orderly, polite sort of affair, because as with Nox, if everyone can’t get along and keep things ticking over, there’s pretty much nowhere else to go without leaving the planet entirely. The forest wookiee tribes live mostly separate from, and in a wary coexistence with, the urban Ska Gorans, and there are treaties governing who tends which bits of the forest that are mostly pretty well-respected.




	9. Religion and Cosmology

You know, let’s just dive right into the bullet points on this one.  


  * **Tython** is a planet full of Force-sensitives, so that kind of takes up the “spirituality” and “cosmology” slots in people’s world-view. There’s plenty of philosophizing and debating about the intricacies of how it all works, but when confirming the basics is as simple as looking with your Force-eyes or levitating things with your brain, everyone pretty much agrees on those and doesn’t make a huge deal out of it.
  * And since the other planets were **originally settled by Tythonians** , their perspective carried over somewhat, even as the largely Force-blind populations there developed more overtly religion-y belief systems over time.
  * **Noxians** will tell you that they’re atheists and have no time for religion, but all the same, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll knock before entering an (apparently) empty room, pet the machines when they’re misbehaving and speak gently to them, and pour a glass of liquor for the spirits before any of your party guests. It’s just not worth risking it. It’s worked for them so far.
  * **Kalimahrians** are largely atheistic, and what religious activity there is tends to be private, contemplative, and coupled with an ethics of “just be decent to each other”.
  * **Shikaakwans** are very public about their religion: There are rituals done in the home to ensure safety and harmony there, but otherwise the emphasis is on public offerings and large festivals put on by the noble families, some of whose priesthoods date back to soon after the original settlement of Shikaakwa. Sacrifice as you or I would think of it isn’t such a huge thing, with more of an emphasis on offering prayers or public art installations that remind people of the sacred and inspire them to contemplation, but high-status Shikaakwans will find a way to be ostentatious about anything; while their lower-class counterparts are chanting or scribbling prayers on scraps of paper to be burned, the nobles are sending servants to the temple with sacks of richly illuminated prayer-scrolls to feed into the fire one by one.
  * **Ska Gorans** center their spirituality, like pretty much everything else in their lives, on the forest. Sacred groves, outdoor worship, and leaving offerings in the trees in exchange for blessings all figure in prominently, and a Ska Goran in a tight spot might promise to spend a certain number of days meditating in the forest in exchange for supernatural help.
  * The **Rakata** have a huge pantheon thanks to absorbing the gods of conquered planets. Those usually end up being repackaged as the children or servants of the Rakatan gods, and the Rakata will swear up and down that they’re the best at worshiping them anyway and the original worshipers need to learn from their guidance. And blood sacrifice is, of course, the order of the day.




	10. Holidays and Traditions

We all need excuses to party, right? I’m pretty sure that’s a universal among sentient beings.

  * All the planets celebrate the **founding of their first settlements** or some similarly civic-pride-encouraging occasion. Regional rivalries, especially on the balkanized planets of Nox and Ska Gora, mean that some cities will substitute their own founding or hiving off from their parent settlement instead.
  * **Ska Gora** and **Shikaakwa** have the most religious populations in the system, so they’re the only ones really bothering about religious holidays. Ska Goran holidays mainly follow the seasons and involve traveling to a sacred site in the forest for a special worship service, then back home for an evening of merrymaking; the Shikaakwan gods and heroes each have their own festival day, on which their priests (mostly wealthy nobles who can well afford it) make offerings and invite their family, friends, overlords, and vassals around for athletic and artistic competitions and lots of feasting and entertainment.
  * **Kalimahr** is less about particular holidays and more about periods of the year where you do things. It varies by what things there are to do at what time in each region, of course, but you might have picnic in the square season, watching plays in the park season, hiking through the forest to see the leaves change season, that sort of thing.
  * On **Tython** , each Temple has a celebration of its founding, on which the Temple is richly decorated, everyone wears their Temple colors, and the residents put on performances and demonstrations of their work and make pilgrimages to the nearby Tho Yor (or its shadow, if it’s floating inaccessibly in the air) to contemplate.



But in terms of celebrations, Tythonians put the most emphasis on personal rites of passage:  


  * **Birthdays** are celebrated with gifts, a nice meal with friends and family, and giving the celebrant a good old-fashioned fussing-over. The big ones are 18 (you’re an adult now!) and 75 (not dead yet! maybe start thinking about retiring!), or the equivalent for non-human species.
  * Tython is full of horrifying **monsters** , remember? A Tythonian’s first time defeating one of them is cause for a big party. The young monster-slayer is given a fancy ritual bath before having a feast with their friends and family (dessert is often a pastry in the shape of the creature they fought), being garbed in a brown robe (the Temple color of Stav Kesh and a symbol of martial competency, since they’re a mighty warrior now; these robes were a major influence on the outer garments we see movie-era Jedi wearing), and then being sent to meditate on death, killing, and their place in the circle of life (cheery!).
  * **Graduations** , specifically conferrals of Mastery, see the new Masters called up by name to give a brief summary of the work they’re being honored for, fitted with a sash in the Temple color, and sent to sit with the other Masters. (The partying happens afterwards.)
  * Marriage isn’t its own thing on Tython; instead, it falls under **adoption** , as the addition of a new person to the family. (So you can adopt someone as your child, your sibling, your spouse, or whatever the heck—the legal system doesn’t care, they’re all counted in the category of “adoptee”.) Adoption party traditions vary a lot by region, species, and family, but there’s a running theme of introducing the adoptee to their new relatives; for example, it might take the form of making traditional foods and drinks for the feast, having every family member dance with the new person, or having the head of the family publicly give them their blessing.




	11. Language

Look. Both of our degrees are in linguistics. Fun was always going to be had. And we definitely weren’t going to be satisfied with just having everyone speak ~~Space English~~ Basic.

  * **Constant migration** and mixing of families means people pick up (and lose) languages a lot, and their skillsets may include some unexpected ones.
  * **Language education** on Tython is pretty solid. It has to be, with so many groups mixing and passing through everywhere and, you know, needing to talk to each other.
  * **Multilingualism** is rampant, on Tython especially but throughout the system as well; people generally know the main language of their planet (or else one of the other common ones), perhaps another one of importance in their particular region or Temple, and the heritage language of their species, at least.
  * That **language-learning Force talent** Revan had? One of our main cast (Sek'nos'rath, my beautiful shirtless Togruta son whom I’ve mentioned a time or two before in these posts) has it too. Or had it first, chronologically, considering the time period we’re working in. And he’s taking full advantage—he was up to 10 languages the last time we checked, though not quite fluent in all of them. _Yet_.



The list:  


  * The **big five** , the main linguae francae of their respective planets, are **Basic** (Tython and Ska Gora), **Catharese** (Nox), **Sullustese** (Kalimahr), **Ryl** (Shikaakwa), and **Shyriiwook** (also Ska Gora). Handy to know when you go traveling, and Tythonian Rangers are expected to have some familiarity with all of them, since they never know where they might get sent.
  * Of **regional** /single-Temple importance on Tython are **Togruti** (Qigong Kesh), **Selkatha** (Mahara Kesh), and **Dai Bendu** (Stav Kesh). 
  * Those with an interest in **Force lore** , **philosophy** , and the more cerebral sort of **poetry** will at least recognize technical terms in **Tythan** and **Mirialan** as well as the aforementioned Togruti and Dai Bendu.
  * Other **niche languages** , mostly spoken by members of the relevant species and their friends and family who’ve been around them long enough to pick them up, include **Dathomirian** , **Zabraki** , **Ugnaught **, and **Iktotchese**.****
****
  * Among the **Rakata** , you have **High Rakatan** , spoken at court, and **Low Rakatan** , the common language of the lower classes and the slave population (they’re closely related—High Rakatan is self-consciously archaizing and puristic, while Low Rakatan has been evolving unmolested). **Basic** is a heritage language of the human population and not spoken much outside it, while **Dathomirian** has a fair bit of currency, to go with Dathomir’s relatively high status for a conquered world. (In-story, we see a Weequay slave default to speaking Dathomirian when faced with a Tythonian whose species she’s never seen before.)
**** 



	12. Fauna

Canon did most of the heavy lifting here, but there were still a few tweaks we made:  


  * Thanks to millennia of living in Magic Space Australia, Tythonians have an extremely skewed sense of what constitutes a **“dangerous creature”**. The only way to get a straight answer on the matter is to ask what body parts you’re likely to lose if a fight goes badly.
  * The genetics department at Anil Kesh still makes its fair share of modifications to the Tythonian wildlife, but since the Despot War never spilled over to Tython, there was no reason for Quan-Jang to weaponize the **terenta**. So in this timeline, they’re fearsome but not the immediate deadly peril they are in canon; our Shae Koda’s most notable pet/lab animal is a terenta named Feral.
  * **Rancors** are, as always, a favorite, though we haven’t seen the flying ones. Yet.
  * **Saarls** still exist, though we don’t have them breathing Force lightning even on special occasions. That said, they’re still terrifying, and even Xesh and Shae Koda, tough even by Tythonian standards, have a healthy respect for the things and only engage them from a distance.
  * **Silik lizards** are big and can bite off bits of you if you piss them off, but they don’t actually want to eat you; they live off heat and radiation absorbed from their environment through something akin to photosynthesis, but they’re territorial and tend to chew on things (like the power lines at places like Adyton in the Silent Desert).
  * **Zhurungs** are large cats that give off enough heat to occasionally set their surroundings on fire. KITTY. FIRE KITTY. :D
  * The Ice Giant range of mountains around Stav Kesh are home to the **Tythonian battle sheep** , an Anil Kesh experiment of ages past gone feral. They’re big, ornery as hell unless they like your Force presence or you’re really good at Force-pacifying animals, they spit a poison that’s also incredibly flammable because why stop there, and their wool is tough enough to have some resistance to energy weapons. Battle sheep cavalry (oviary?) are less of a thing at Stav Kesh than they once were, but there’s still the occasional eccentric studying the ancient martial art of fighting from sheep-back.
  * Furies Gate is so named because it’s the home of the **furies** , creatures that combine all the worst qualities of a wasp, a wookiee, and an especially pointy crystal formation. They run on electrical energy converted from sunlight or absorbed from the environment, and you do not want to step into their territory. They will hunt you down as far as the orbital station if not further, and it will not go well with you. The Ranger who nearly died in a spaceship fire because she had to pilot her damaged ship all the way to Mawr to escape a pursuing fury wasn’t an entirely atypical case.




	13. Flora

…yeah. Honestly, we haven’t got much for this one. Well, here goes:  


  * I mentioned Akar Kesh being known for its gardens. That was an understatement. Much of the Temple is covered in some kind of vegetation, and if it grows on a plant, it’s probably to be had there. It gives the place a calming, pleasant sort of ambiance, which is an important counterbalance to all the spirited debate going on, and the produce is amazing.
  * There’s a rare Force talent that lets a person sense and affect plants with preternatural levels of control, including sensing their health and needs, speeding up their growth processes, training them into shapes, and all sorts of other things you might want to do with a plant. Sadly for me, telling you which of our main cast turns out to have it would be a spoiler.
  * The apex trees on Ska Gora aren’t quite the same as the wroshyr trees of Kashyyyk, but they make a damned good substitute, hence the wookiees making themselves at home. There are some tensions with urban Ska Gorans who make their living tending the trees—it was kind of touch and go there for a while when the treaties were still being hashed out—and since Ska Goran religion centers on the forest, there’s a tendency to romanticize the forest wookiees as noble savages who are closer to the spirit world. For the wookiees’ part, they just want to live their lives, thanks.




	14. Food

While we did have things like chocolate and apples turning up, we were hardly going to just leave it there. The cuisines of the Tythos system, by planet:

**Nox** :  


  * The Noxian environment is really not friendly to food production; local produce from the hydroponics labs ranges from “you tried” to “kind of OK, actually”, while other ingredients have to be imported or made from things no one on other planets would consider food (yes, this includes bodies). So the quality is…mostly not great.
  * To try and paper over this, the use of spices and other flavorings has been raised to an art form. The spice rack of a Noxian home cook will often put those of other planets’ chefs to shame.
  * Similarly, a lot of dishes are spicy enough to qualify as chemical weapons.
  * All their preparation methods carry over to Noxian immigrant communities on other planets, where they have better ingredients available, so their restaurants are popular with the sort of person who thinks their spice tolerance is directly proportional to their worth as a sentient being. You know the type. Don’t order anything “Noxian hot” unless you know _exactly_ what you’re doing.

**Kalimahr** :  


    * There’s a pretty broad diversity of regional cuisines. The main common thread is that they’re all good at a certain kind of fanciness or richness that’s satisfying rather than intimidating.
    * They’re good at desserts, too. Kalimahrian pastry chefs are in a fair bit of demand elsewhere.
    * Their wines aren’t half bad either, though there are regions on Shikaakwa that definitely give them a run for their money.

**Shikaakwa** :  


    * They haven’t got the terrain to go all that heavy on things like grains.
    * Instead, things to be had from the sea or mountains play a much more prominent role: algae, fish and other sea creatures, fruit, nuts, the hardier sort of vegetables, and space-goat or space-mutton.
    * The court chefs are constantly coming up with novel—well, kind of novel, enough to be amusing for a bit—ways to dress up and recombine extant foods in between wowing their employers with expensive imported ingredients. You’d be surprised how many permutations they come up with.

**Ska Gora** :  


    * Those trees, of course. The rather starchy fruits are an important staple, and syrup made from the sap is the most common sweetener.
    * With not much else coming from the surface, fish and seaweed are huge.
    * Poultry and eggs are also important, because birds are hands down the easiest livestock to keep when you literally live in the sky.

**Tython** :  


    * The constant influx of people from other planets means lots of import shops and ethnic restaurants to cater to the immigrants. More on that below. 
    * As a side note, with the entire planet full of Force-sensitives, food items where you have to, say, use the Force to break down poisons in them are no less accessible than those that have to be thoroughly cooked or carefully butchered, which leaves them in a position to take advantage of a lot more of the local plants and animals than they could otherwise.
    * Tythonian local cuisines, **by Temple** : 
      * The gardens of **Akar Kesh** produce a lot of high-quality plant-based foods, which makes the place popular with vegetarians and vegans. Even the omnivores don’t eat that much meat, because they’re too busy taking advantage of the bewildering variety of awesome vegetarian food.
      * The genetics department at **Anil Kesh** is in the business of improving food crops, among other things, so you get a lot of simple-seeming foods made from ingredients engineered to be extra-tasty and nutritious.
      * **Bodhi** is the home of the chef training program, so you see lots of culinary experiments; its tropical island location means there are a lot of good fruit and fish to be had.
      * **Mahara Kesh** is Selkath country, so I hope you like their cuisine. Algae, fish, and other sea life are the main focus.
      * **Kaleth** , up on its plateau, has a hearty, stodgy temperate-region cuisine.
      * **Padawan Kesh** doesn’t have much of a cuisine of its own, but as the point of entry for those coming in from elsewhere, it’s the place to go for off-world food. The school staff do pretty decent renditions of popular dishes, but for the really good stuff, you want to hit up the places run by and for immigrants: import shops, hole-in-the-wall cafes, and the like.
      * **Qigong Kesh** is a little unfortunately situated for plant life but well-supplied with meat. Cooks from carnivorous species like togruta and zabraks really shine here. (The current regime is led by togruta matriarch Miarta Sek and her tribe, and this suits them just fine.)
      * **Stav Kesh** is home to a lot of ethical vegetarians and vegans, since violence being their job means they tend to think more about it—and the costs and consequences of it. The mountaintop location means mostly altitude-friendly grain-based food, plus a well-developed variety of vegan substitutes for the meat and dairy that otherwise figure heavily into the cuisine.
      * **Vur Tepe** has some nice, fertile volcanic soil going on, and their fruit in particular is excellent (and in everything).



**The Rakata** :  


  * Cooking is very homogeneous in each region/planet, since ordinary citizens are fed at public cantinas rather than preparing their own food.
  * The people who have their own kitchens are the ones rich enough to have slaves to staff them.
  * When you have guests over for dinner, showing off with just the right level of fanciness in the meal is one of the most important things to do. Showing off too much asserts dominance, while showing off too little tells them they’re not worth the effort, so you have to get this one exactly right.
  * That showing off is done through expensive ingredients, showy presentation, and elaborate preparation methods; taste kind of falls by the wayside sometimes.
  * Cannibalism is a grand old Rakatan tradition, with the losers of battles as the prototypical victims.




	15. Technology

There isn’t much that we did here that wouldn’t be better saved for the 20th (“Arms and Armor”) or the 27th (“Transportation”), but we did have one issue to clean up regarding holograms and holocrons.  


  * True holocrons won’t be invented for a while yet, but our lot are able to create some remarkably lifelike holograms.
  * Unlike holocrons, though, these holograms don’t encode a person’s entire personality and knowledge base, but are limited to a specific subject or set of interactions.
  * There are a few questions that the technology of the day still needs to answer before the holocron proper can be invented: How do you make an AI flexible and knowledgeable enough to handle absolutely any question or interaction that can be thrown at it the way the real person would? How do you get all the data that form their mind out of their head and into a usable digital format? And what medium do you use to store all that data in a hand-held rather than house-sized device?
  * If you’re wondering what happened to the two holocrons seen or mentioned in the comic, we’re not concerning ourselves with the Kwa here, and Daegen Lok instead left behind an extensive video memoir/interview series. (Now imagine being the hapless student tasked with encouraging an elderly Daegen to talk about himself.)




	16. Magic

A quick out-of-universe note: I’ll be going into our analysis of the Force and its Light and Dark Sides today, which owes less to the movies or even the comic and more to the Mortis arc of The Clone Wars (and perhaps a little to the Legends novels of Matthew Stover). I wonder how recognizable it would be to the creators of all the various parts of the Star Wars universe.

In our GFFA, **Balance** is the natural state of the Force; the Dark Side is still limited to the Rakata and those they’ve pulled in with them, and the Light Side is as yet undiscovered. If you were looking to see the heroes slinging Force Lightning around like they do in the comic, well, I’m sorry.  


  * Yeah, we weren’t kidding about that “Balance being the natural state of the Force” thing. You literally just **use the Force with a clear head** and don’t, er, _force_ things either way.
  * **Strong emotions** make it harder to stay Balanced but far from impossible. So no, that toddler flinging their toys across the room with the Force didn’t just fall to the Dark Side, that’d be silly.
  * The balance in question is between the self-absorption of the Dark Side and the self-effacement of the light, **“taking what we are given”** (apologies to Kol Skywalker, who might well be unhappy with me for appropriating his catchphrase here) rather than trying to take more from the universe (Dark) or to reject its gifts and give them back to be redistributed (Light). There’s a lot of room for movement between the two poles before you get so extreme about one that you fall to it. So go ahead, rescue that kitten, or buy that last dress you like.
  * **The Dark Side** is all about self-absorption, even indirectly through attachment to a particular goal.
  * After all, that goal is _your_ goal and is tied up with your **ego** , else you wouldn’t obsess over it so.
  * Because of this, it’s entirely possible to Fall by **aiming at the Light Side and missing** —you’re not doing these things for yourself, it’s all for your loved ones, right? Right? (No. It’s your **attachment to the outcome** that’s bringing your ego in, not whose benefit you’re ostensibly doing the thing for.)
  * Its ultimate expression is becoming an indiscriminately destructive monster like late-stage Palpatine or Cronal, where everything has ceased to matter but your own **power** (power to do what? you’ve probably forgotten by now).
  * It’s **pretty rough on the health and lifespan**. (Twisting and abusing your connection to the life force of the universe? Unhealthy? No, never.) Life-extending techniques are known but not yet fully refined; Force Hounds (Force-sensitives enslaved by the Rakata as Dark Side-using bodyguards for the elite, more on them on the 19th when it’s time for war) in particular are venerable elders by 40, and it’s not just because the job is dangerous.
  * **The Light Side’s** nature is of self-effacement with a side of passivity.
  * You’re **offering your very self** to the use and interests of all beings, with no particular investment in what exactly they do with you.
  * Its ultimate expression is giving up your actual life and fading into the Force as a **Force Ghost**.
  * It’s **even harder on your physical being** than the Dark Side, since you’re literally giving up your individual being, including your connection to the physical through your body, and mitigating the effects is…kind of anathema to what you’re doing here.




	17. Medicine

At this time depth, frankly, it’d be weird if medical technology were in the same place it is in the movies, no?  


  * There’s no equivalent of kolto or bacta, so injuries and disease have to be healed the old-fashioned way.
  * (You know who does have kolto, though? The Rakata. Them specifically, not their servants or citizens of conquered worlds; the dictator of Manaan isn’t about to lower the exorbitant price of the stuff, so it’s too expensive for anyone but the elite.)
  * To be fair, Force-healing techniques have reached a level that will never be so much as approached by future generations who don’t have to rely on them so heavily.
  * And research is happening into doing something similar with cloned cell cultures, genetically engineered to fight disease or heal injuries when pasted onto a patient with the Force.
  * And by “research is happening”, I mean there’s a lab at the Anil Kesh genetics department full of jars of disturbing-looking flesh blobs.
  * They have names.
  * See the eyeball on top of that one? I think it’s looking at you.




	18. Fashion

Again, canon did the really heavy lifting here (visual media like comics and games are great for that), but we did have to make some changes:  


  * No **randomly armored shoulders** on everyone, that’s silly and weird. And kind of useless.
  * **Cleavage windows**! Cleavage windows are definitely a thing. Though not on battle gear. They’re the sort of element that turns up in an outfit you wear to look nice, not to protect you on the hunt or the battlefield.
  * The movie-era Jedi uniform is a direct descendant of what we call the Tythonian **“tracksuit”** : an ensemble of loose pants, tabard-like top with long ends that tie around the waist to secure it, and an optional tank top underneath, worn during exercise, martial arts training, and the like.
  * **Fashions vary** by planet, species, region, and socioeconomic status, of course. It’d be silly if they didn’t. 
  * Fashion coming out of the **Shikaakwan** court, for example, includes a lot of multi-layered dresses with split overskirts, as well as hair (for species who have it) worn in ribbon-wrapped pigtails that suggest twi'lek lekku wrappings.
  * **Dathomirian** clothing consists of a fitted shirt and pants, plus a wide sash that wraps around the waist several times (and is rather handy for tucking sheath knives and such into), with all the pieces often richly embroidered.
  * **Togruta** don’t tend to wear very much; breast bands are worn when needed (think Ahsoka’s tube top in TCW), but otherwise, shirtlessness is their default state when the weather allows it, and pants and skirts tend to be short as well.
  * Each of the Tythonian Temples has a **color** associated with it. Temple colors tend to be worn on special occasions, at least, and they’re seen fairly often in residents’ everyday clothes as well. The list: 
    * **Akar Kesh** : gold or yellow
    * **Anil Kesh** : silver
    * **Bodhi** : a stylized floral pattern in various colors, because they just had to be special, didn’t they
    * **Kaleth** : red
    * **Mahara Kesh** : blue
    * **Padawan Kesh** : white
    * **Qigong Kesh** : black
    * **Stav Kesh** : brown
    * **Vur Tepe** : gray




	19. War

…you know, for a series that’s ostensibly about a war, this isn’t a subject we’ve spent all that much time on.  


  * **Stav Kesh’s Knights** are what passes for a Tythonian military. They’re less prominent than they might be if they didn’t live on a planet so hostile to most outsiders. (And policing is handled by the Rangers, so there’s no call for the military unless something’s really gone very wrong.)
  * **Shikaakwa** no longer has a military per se, since it was disbanded after the Despot War. The noble families do have private security forces, staffed by vassals and junior family members, but to accomplish anything large-scale, the families have to agree on it, which is a huge ask on Shikaakwa.
  * **Kalimahr** has a planet-wide militia, while the cities of **Nox** and **Ska Gora** each have local security forces. They mostly behave.
  * The **Rakatan** military is divided between **slave soldiers** (including the barely-sentient Flesh Raiders, genetically engineered from lower-ranking Rakata), who live and die as grunts or maybe squad leaders, **free soldiers** , who can reach the lowest officer ranks, and **Rakata** , who form most of the officer corps.
  * Rakatan **warships** include the partially droid-crewed capital ships, made in the Star Forge and assigned to predors (generals/admirals, roughly) by the emperor, and troop carriers and escorts, manufactured by more mundane methods and crewed by soldiers. Capital ships are the only ones, aside from tiny scout ships, with hyperdrives—they need a lot of power to run, and Force-sensitive slaves hooked up to life-draining machines are an expensive and bulky (though powerful) fuel source—so all the other ships attach to them to travel between systems, which puts a hard limit on the size of a fleet. (And yes, the droid crew are used by the emperor and his people to spy and make sure the predor isn’t planning anything untoward. Again, what are you, new?)
  * Oh, and then there are **Force Hounds**. Those are Force-sensitive slaves taken by elite Rakata as bodyguards and guides. 
    * The **basic duty** of a Force Hound is to defend their master and sense things for them in the Force, whether that means ill intent from those around them or a potentially rewarding territory to invade.
    * Force Hound **training** starts very young, typically between ages 7 and 12 or species equivalent; puberty is the approximate upper limit. When they hit adolescence, they become too resistant to the methods used by the Rakata to shape them to really be worth it, and a Hound whose training started late may turn out a bit defective. (You’ll see in-story what I mean by that—for now, suffice it to say that “defective” is very much from a specifically Rakatan perspective.)
    * That shaping involves basically forcing them to fall to the **Dark Side** , among other things.
    * The children, like other slaves, are a mix of those kidnapped on **raids** , captured in the **conquest** of their planet, or given to the Rakata as **tribute** from a conquered world.
    * Their **loyalty** is ensured by something akin to a mind trick that lasts for the life of the Rakata who performed it. A Hound who loses their master and is taken by another one will need to be mind-whammied again by the new person.
    * Most Hounds serve either **nobles** at court or **military officers** ; court Hounds protect their masters from all the plotting and backstabbing going on, while military Hounds fight alongside their masters on campaign and protect them on the battlefield, as well as guiding them to the best conquests.
    * **Other duties** can be assigned as needed, but time your Hound spends doing other things is time they don’t spend guarding your back. That said, during quiet periods, it’s not uncommon to see Hounds tasked with minding their masters’ children or set to fight in the arena as entertainment.
    * Having a Hound is a **status symbol** , like any other sort of slave. Having more than one is the preserve of the highest ranks in Rakatan society. They’re expensive, for one.
    * Force Hounding is a **very, very rough life**. I was absolutely not kidding about the “ancient by 40” thing. A military Hound in particular, or a court Hound whose master’s position is less than secure, has to be incredibly lucky or extremely good at what they do to make it that far.




	20. Arms and Armor

Come on, folks, it’s Star Wars, you know exactly what I’m going to talk about today.  


  * That’s right, lightsabers. When our story begins, they’ve existed for a bit, but strictly as the preserve of the Rakata. (More specifically, they’re what Force Hounds are armed with.)
  * The Tythonians are damned close to inventing them independently, mind. Master Madog of Vur Tepe has come up with a prototype design, he just needs to iron out one or two more things…
  * Like the Jedi of the movie era, our lightsaber users are expected to search in caves for their kyber crystal and then build the saber around it themselves.
  * The design used by Force Hounds has a nasty tendency to overheat and explode when used for too long at a time. Although “too long” means keeping it activated for hours at a go, so the general attitude is “so don’t do that, then”. Force Hounds’ sabers are built big and sturdy enough to use as truncheons, so they’re still useful weapons when deactivated.
  * Unlike in the comic, where sabers were activated by channeling the Dark Side into them, these have mechanical on/off switches like movie-era sabers do.




	21. Fun

Let’s just get down to the bullet points today:  


  * All the usual **art forms** are to be found: music, dance, theater, cinema (both standalone features and series akin to real-world TV), painting/drawing, textiles/fashion, sculpture, cookery, and so on and so forth. More on them on the 26th, when it’s time for art.
  * **Fandom** is absolutely a thing, including fanfic. (Tasha Ryo may never live down that smutty self-insert fic based on the Dashing Drexia YA series. But to be fair, it was terrible.)
  * Card, tabletop, and computer **games** are all common as well. 
  * Temples all have particular **prank** cultures: Anil Kesh has a particular tree that students traditionally tie their masters’ underwear to, Kaleth has practical jokes with groups of numbered animals that have gotten increasingly meta over the years, students at Bodhi like to paint or yarnbomb things, and so on.
  * **The colonies** have a lot of **extreme sports** enabled by the terrain, like dune buggy or wind glider races; they’re terribly dangerous and no sane person would participate, but that’s half the fun!
  * **Shikaakwa** has a lot of **winter sports** , skiing and the like, as well as sailing.
  * **Kalimahr** has a notable **martial arts** circuit. The disciplines in question range from practical and brutal to showboaty and half-ballet.
  * **Nox** and **Ska Gora** (especially the former) both love their inter-city sports rivalries; Nox in particular has a **competitive computer gaming** circuit, while both of them have **scaled-down versions of team sports** that can be played in smaller spaces (often looked down on by players of the “full” versions from other planets).
  * **Rakata** have slaves and animals fighting in the **arena** (Force Hounds only fight in single combat, while Force-blind slaves will sometimes be pitted against each other en masse for a big spectacle), as well as **public bathhouses/gyms** for citizens to relax and work out.
  * **Drugs** that provide a pleasant, relaxing high are easily available and subsidized by the government, just keep them well away from your Force Hound—being high messes with their ability to tap into the Force, and you do want them able to do their job, right?




	22. Work

The Tythonian attitude towards work and professions may need a bit of explaining.  


  * The Temple system puts a person’s **talents and abilities** firmly at the center of their identity. There’s a pervasive attitude of “you are your profession/research field”.
  * **Work for its own sake** is seen as pointless (and the grunt work of society is handled by droids anyway), so it’s all about doing stuff you’re really good at and nurturing your talents.
  * The flip side of this is that if you’re **not notably talented** at anything, or haven’t got it in you to put the necessary time and energy towards really being first-rate at something, you’re…kind of fucked.
  * **Support positions** (like working in a shop on the Temple grounds or doing low-level admin work) are an option, as is **dropping out completely** to live on a remote farm or another planet, but there’s a stigma there. Don’t you want to be somebody? You’re not trying hard enough!
  * And since the escape routes are mostly there for **Force-blind people** , there’s some annoying discourse about “lazy” Force-sensitives stealing resources from those who “really need them”.



Meanwhile, in the **Infinite Empire:**  


  * The Rakata figure any but the most intellectual sort of **labor** is for slaves, or at least for lesser beings. Either way, it’s below them.
  * The more **thinking** your job entails and the more people you give orders to, the more worthy you are as a sentient being.
  * Really, those lesser species **ought to be grateful** to have the Rakata to do their thinking for them and give order and meaning to their lives!
  * The way they **sabotage each other** and get sullen and slow over nothing, it’s a wonder they even created a semblance of civilization before they joined the Infinite Empire!
  * Of course this isn’t caused by the **Rakata-imposed atmosphere** of “everyone is against you, you have to be out for yourself” and use of terror as a management tactic, what would make you think that?




	23. The Sky

Tython has two moons, Ashla and Bogan (again, not responsible for these names), whose names are still used in the movie era to refer to the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. We…made a few changes.  


  * Both moons were the sites of **early colonies** as the founding population of the system began expanding outward from Tython. Most people either went on further to settle on the other planets or went back to Tython, so all government services (outside of the facilities I’ll be detailing below) were cancelled, and the remaining population consists of a few isolated, ferociously self-sufficient homesteaders.
  * **Historical sites** on both moons are maintained by an agency headquartered in Kaleth. 
  * What’s left of the **Ashla** colony serves as the neutral meeting grounds of the Tythos system, a place for diplomats to negotiate treaties and such.
  * **Bogan** is the site of Tython’s biggest prison facility, for inmates who need to be isolated off-planet for the safety of everyone around them.
  * The prison is administered from Tython, but there are **treaties** allowing the other planets to send the worst of their worst there, the mass murderers and such.
  * Since it was built to keep Force-sensitives in, the **security** is kind of overkill for everyone else, but better safe than sorry, I guess.
  * Prisoners get periodic **check-ins and counseling** over the comms, and their sentence ends when the counselor is willing to vouch for them being ready to rejoin society; their reintroduction is then taken in stages.
  * What’s that? Solitary confinement is torture, and someone needs to remind the Tythonian government what **sentient rights** are? Why yes, there are elements throughout the system that agree with you.
  * Remember **Hawk Ryo** , younger brother to Despot Volnos Ryo of Shikaakwa? He’s been up there for about twelve years when our story begins. Certain elements on Shikaakwa like to use his continued imprisonment as a pretext for anti-Tython grumbling.
  * And he doesn’t seem to be getting any better, either. It’s really **not looking good** for him to be released anytime soon.
  * They’ll be discussing **aspects of his case** a hundred years hence in law classes at Akar Kesh, I suspect: what happens when restorative justice gets a little too much of the retributive in it and fails, political considerations and ramifications when foreign dignitaries fuck up on Tython and have to go through the justice system, the pros and cons of keeping prisoners isolated, and so on and so forth.




	24. The Frontier

So far, this series has concentrated mostly on the Tythos system. So, what’s beyond it?  


  * A whole bunch of weird stuff. We’re very close to the center of the galaxy here, the sort of region that tends to hold things like supermassive black holes.
  * The gravitational and electromagnetic landscape of the area is certainly not all that friendly to hyperspace navigation. Not that our lot have hyperdrives yet, but…
  * It’s kept the Rakata away, at least. For now.
  * The Rakatan Infinite Empire has taken over quite a decent chunk of the galaxy. They are not nice.
  * They’ll show up on your planet, raid you repeatedly (destroying all your stuff and killing or kidnapping as many of your people as they can) until you surrender, then demand obedience and tribute in perpetuity as they integrate you into their empire.
  * It’s worked for them so far—only a few planets have successfully repelled them.
  * And remember when I said the Dark Side was mostly limited to them? It may not be quite right to say they invented it, but they certainly codified and popularized it.
  * They’re coming.
  * For you.
  * When you least expect it.




	25. The Backpack

I honestly wasn’t sure what to do with this prompt; in the end, I decided to take “backpack” as symbolic of travel and talk about migration, tourism, and other movement in the Tythos system. By planet:

 **Nox:**  


  * Nox tends to side-eye those who want to move away. If you’re far enough up the hierarchy, for starters, you could be taking trade secrets with you.
  * And living in one of the most awful environments on any of the settled worlds has become an odd point of pride. What, are you too weak to hack it here? No pride in being Noxian? Properly breathable atmospheres are for sellouts.
  * Visitors are usually there for something specific, like visiting friends or attending events of some sort (like the space versions of E3 or CES).



**Krev Coeur:**  


  * There’s a fairly well-developed tourist infrastructure for all the pilgrims and sightseers.
  * The planet is barren, though, so everything has to be supplied from Tython, which makes the prices ridiculous.
  * Ordinary folk on pilgrimage often stay in campgrounds and bring as many supplies from home as possible; there are proper resorts, and they’re very nice, but only the wealthy can afford to even think about staying there.



**Tython:**  


  * Tython sees a steady flow of migration both in (mostly Force-sensitives entering the Tythonian education system) and out (mostly Force-blind people moving somewhere they’re less likely to get eaten).
  * The Tythonian government provides grants for Force-sensitives who want to move there but can’t swing it financially, but the budget for that is finite.
  * The biggest number of Tythonian expatriates end up on Kalimahr, thanks to friendly relations between the two and the existing Tythonian community making new arrivals feel at home, but the other planets see some as well (mostly those whose families were from there to begin with).
  * Tourism on Tython is mostly limited to the sort of person who wants to go back home and brag about outrunning a lion. That was on fire. And augmenting its speed with the Force. You know the sort.



**Kalimahr:**  


  * Kalimahr can afford to take a relaxed attitude toward its people leaving—the balance of migration is very much in, not out.
  * It’s safe, it’s peaceful, the weather’s pretty nice, the food’s great, of course everyone would want to come live here!
  * There’s plenty of tourism, too, mostly people looking for “culture” or some nice, tame, non-threatening nature to spend a few days in.



**Shikaakwa:**  


  * Why would you ever want to leave your family? What kind of Shikaakwan are you?
  * People do move there, but without connections already in place, it can be kind of rough.
  * Tourism focuses on the wilder, more picturesque areas. Fans of the place often compare it favorably to the too-touristy (in their opinion) Kalimahr; Kalimahr partisans in turn deride Shikaakwa as being low on decent infrastructure and kind of hostile to outsiders.



**Ska Gora:**  


  * Ska Gora takes an attitude of “FLY, MY PRETTIES!” to its citizens, encouraging them to spend time off-planet or emigrate when things get a little too crowded back home. They’re also _very strongly_ encouraged to behave themselves out there, since the continued existence of those escape routes depends on Ska Gorans having a good reputation across the system.
  * Good luck moving to, or even visiting, Ska Gora; you need a permit for either, and those are doled out very, very sparingly. Daegen Lok, in his Ranger days, used to angle for assignments there because he liked the place and it was the only way he’d get to go.



**The colonies around Obri and Mawr:**  


  * Most colonists are people who wanted a fresh start in life, or just more of a challenge. Although Shikaakwan colonies in particular will have entire vassal families or cadet branches of the clans that run them that have simply made themselves at home. It is a rough life, though.
  * Tourism is mostly for the unique landscapes or, more often, the weird/extreme sports.



**Furies Gate:**  


  * Both the surface station and the orbital facility are populated entirely by staff and researchers who rotate home every so often. You’d have to be smoking something good to want to visit the place for fun.
  * Sleeper ships, sent out into the wider galaxy with cryogenically frozen passengers to potentially found colonies in other star systems, are launched from the orbital facility. Most of the passengers either fell in love with the idea of exploring the galaxy or didn’t think the colonies were quite far enough to run away from whatever they were fleeing.
  * Mind, there’s a conspiracy theory going around that there are no sleeper ships, that those who sign up as passengers are simply killed. Opinions differ on what terrible secret the planetary governments are trying to protect by murdering anyone with the inclination to explore beyond the Tythos system.
  * This theory is silly and easily falsified, but isn’t that always the way?
  * Just wait until the believers find out about the Infinite Empire, though.
  * Hehehehehe.




	26. Art

I’ve mentioned the arts a few times throughout this series, now let’s get properly into it:

  * The other Temples on Tython do have the occasional artistically-inclined local, but **Bodhi** is home to all the serious arts training programs and generally the place to be. Departments include drawing/painting, literature, sculpture, music, dance, theater, cinema, fashion/textiles, body art (including makeup, hairdressing, and tattoo art), architecture, cookery, and probably more besides that I’ve forgotten.
  * The **Force** allows the dancers, actors, and other performers whose art relies on their physical prowess to do things that would require special effects in the real world.
  * It also means less restriction on **body types** , especially in dance; you want everyone to be strong and flexible enough to do the moves, but them being light doesn’t particularly matter when you can just levitate them.
  * As many languages as are spoken on Tython, there’s quite a population of **translators**. Three populations, actually—one at Akar Kesh for legal texts, one at Kaleth for non-fiction prose, and one at Bodhi for the creative stuff.
  * And yes, there’s **discourse** regarding different philosophies and styles of translation. “You’re doing violence to the poem by rearranging the lines to make the Basic syntax work and changing which words are in impact positions” vs. “The original Mirialan was grammatically unremarkable, so importing its syntax wholesale and making weird-sounding Basic out of it is totally changing the feel of the text” is only the beginning. (Also, that one translator who always seems to end up with more footnotes than actual text. They have their fans in Kaleth, but not many outside it.)
  * Bodhi is one of the more open, spread-out Temples, with lots of pleasant **outdoor spaces** to practice or work on a project. You might come across someone playing scales on an instrument, rehearsing a monologue, or covering a colleague in body paint, who knows?



Meanwhile, in the **Infinite Empire** :

  * They’ve got Ideas™ regarding which art forms and genres are **True Art** and which ones are just trash.
  * What these opinions actually are **varies widely**. Generally speaking, especially at court, the ruler’s word on these matters is law. Is abstract painting the favorite of his hated rival? Did his concubine have a clutch of eggs with a dancer? Those things will be strongly out of favor at his court until he calms down or dies, but elsewhere in the Empire they may be celebrated.
  * There’s a strong focus on visual arts: paintings and reliefs, both representative (mostly battle scenes) and abstract, statuary, and wearables like clothing or ceremonial weapons and armor.
  * Rakata don’t **hear** the same way we do, thanks to their lack of proper ears, so music is a baffling habit of the lesser species, and dance is generally done without musical accompaniment beyond maybe someone beating out a rhythm with a cane or drum.
  * The oldest and most typically Rakatan form of **theater** is basically arena fighting with storylines and characters layered onto it—think pro wrestling with people actually dying in the ring.
  * **Cinema** is also a thing, and tends to have lots of fighting in it.
  * Books on **warfare** , including biographies (fictionalized or no) of famous military figures, are always popular, and battle reenactments and similar are common in the performing arts.
  * Other literature is aimed at women and the lower strata of Rakatan society and tends to be strongly **didactic**. Mind, the morals being conveyed are things like “if you find out people are plotting against your husband, you should be a good wife and poison them all”.
  * Yeah, their **romance novels** are…interesting. Villains tend to be lower-ranking folk trying to usurp their betters and getting their comeuppance by the end. There’s plenty of poisoning and stabbing to go around.
  * Stock characters include a wide array of species-based **slave stereotypes** , and courtly romances often include a badass but volatile and dim-witted Force Hound as a comic relief character (loyal to their owner and therefore heroic vs. disloyal and villainous depends on what the author needs them for in the story, and their gullibility is a common plot point either way).




	27. Transportation

No lie, we’ve mostly just vagued this subject in-story, but here goes:

  * Tython’s Temples have extremely well-developed **public transit**. At their size, they need it.
  * There are also transit systems for moving around **between Temples** and for going from **planet to planet** ; those last transports are bigger and run less often, more commercial airline than long-distance bus.
  * Because you can get damn near anywhere on public transit, it’s very rare for people to **own their own transports** ; those such as Rangers and Temple Masters who need absolute freedom of movement will be issued a ship or speeder by their agency or Temple.
  * In the **farming villages** , everyone at least has a speeder to get around on, but they’re just about the only ones.
  * The Temples’ public transit systems are **well-maintained** and comfortable enough to take a nice nap in.
  * Those Temples whose design includes a lot of elevation changes, like Stav Kesh, depend heavily on things like elevators and cable cars to move between levels, which are hard to make as capacious as something like a train system, so **vertical movement** is often the limiting factor as far as travel times.
  * And some of them are outdoors and have nice enough views to be **tourist attractions**. You know what, if you’re trying to actually get somewhere, just avoid those if you can.
  * The usual “personal space is at a premium here” **etiquette** kicks in when riding mass transit: don’t talk to people unless you’re traveling together or it’s an emergency, don’t block access to things like seats or doors, don’t impede the flow of traffic, don’t take up disability or species accommodations that someone else needs and you don’t, and so on and so forth.
  * The systems, especially the one at Anil Kesh, have had to be laboriously proofed against **monsters**. The last thing you want is a rancor deciding your tram looks like a fun toy, or a saarl picking your subway tunnel as a nesting site.




	28. Major Figures and Important Players

Telling you about pretty much anyone in our main cast would be both a) spoiler central and b) subject to change as more of the story gets written, so a selection of political leaders from across the system it is. (Nox and Ska Gora have one city leader listed for each because if we tried to give you bios for all of them, we’d be here for an extra month. At least.)

**The Tythonian Temple Masters’ Council:**

  * **Akar Kesh: Ketu, Master of Philosophy.** The closest thing to a Tythonian head of state, a human born on Ska Gora and brought to Tython when he was found to be Force-sensitive. All of forty when we meet him, which is rather young for a Temple Master; he was elevated to his rank in a hurry when his predecessor, Rajivari, started calling for full civil rights to be restricted to Force-sensitives and had to be shown the door. Ketu had been a student of Rajivari’s, but he had managed not to absorb the old man’s nastier traits and was vocally against this last program of his, which made him a popular candidate to succeed him.
  * **Anil Kesh: Quan-Jang, Master of Science.** A Tython-born human, getting to the age where he’s thinking about retirement (i.e., well into his seventies)—his student Daegen Lok seems to be the most likely successor. Quan-Jang is a geneticist whose true passion, passed down to his second apprentice Shae Koda, is the big scary monsters that populate so much of Tython. His teaching lineage is marked by, shall we say, a dry and irreverent sense of humor.
  * **Bodhi: Jaume Fenn, Master of Arts.** Ketu’s brother-in-law, and almost as young, brought in when his predecessor supported Rajivari’s discriminatory policies and was thrown out alongside him. This left Jaume having to earn the respect of some of the other Council members, as well as of the citizenry at large, but earn it he did. A dancer and choreographer whose performances attract oglers as well as connoisseurs (the solo piece he dedicated to Ranger Bel Zana while courting her caused a bit of a stir).
  * **Mahara Kesh: Calleh and Naro, Masters of Healing.** A pair of selkath, appointed together for their equal competence and complementary specialties, and now an actual couple. It’s sweet, really. Calleh runs the health services, and Naro runs the medical research and healer training programs.
  * **Kaleth: Kora Ryo, Master of Knowledge.** A Shikaakwan twi'lek in her mid-forties, and a respected historian. She’s been the Temple Master for about three years now, since her predecessor retired. Kora has a daughter with the Despot of Shikaakwa, but he had to put them aside to make peace with the anti-Tython factions in his court; little Tasha was raised with the help of zabrak student Ters Sendon (now making a name for himself in Bodhi’s painting department) and looks to be following in her mother’s footsteps.
  * **Padawan Kesh: Ruhr, Master of Apprentices.** A Ska Goran forest wookiee who came to Tython to be trained in the Force. Gentle, eminently reasonable, and not known to rip limbs off as far as anyone knows.
  * **Qigong Kesh: Miarta Sek, Master of Skills.** An elderly togruta matriarch with a veritable horde of children and grandchildren, some quite prominent themselves. Physically imposing, and quite attractive as they go, even now that she’s showing her age.
  * **Stav Kesh: Lha-Mi, Master of Martial Arts.** Commander-in-chief, if you will, of what passes for a Tythonian military, with his personal specialty in strategy and tactics. A middle-aged talid with young grandchildren, and noted as being quite the social butterfly by talid standards; it’s a bit like being the world’s shortest giant, but it’s a start. Married to President Phon-Gyi of Kalimahr, q.v.
  * **Vur Tepe: Tem Madog, Master of the Forge.** A cathar from Nox, whose own studies have focused on the energetic properties of kyber crystals (like a furrier, less tragic Galen Erso). He has a mostly-working design for a prototype lightsaber, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. He’s…about to get some help with that.



**Despot Volnos “the Ox” Ryo of Shikaakwa:**

  * The Ryo clan of twi'leks is powerful, with extensive holdings and numerous and well-placed vassals, and has supplied several generations of Shikaakwan rulers. Volnos himself is the middle son of the previous despot (Hadiya doesn’t count).
  * He was fairly attractive in his youth, though his brothers both outshone him there. And with the Stallion being groomed for the throne and the Hawk being trained in the Force on Tython, that wasn’t the only way he seemed unremarkable by comparison.
  * Though to be fair, he made far less of a nuisance of himself than they did, keeping mainly to his books and his boxing.
  * He was really not happy about having to give up his wife and daughter or risk another war, though they were already less close than they could have been thanks to so much time living separately; even as “the spare”, he had enough to do that he couldn’t spend much time on Tython with them.
  * He’s less of a boor than in canon, though that’s not a high bar to clear.
  * Relations with Tython are…complicated. Downright chilly, to be honest, though there’s an awareness on both sides that things could be better, that they could be friendlier than all that. Perhaps if things were different.
  * Most of his reign so far has been spent getting the families who supported Hadiya back onside, or at least pacified enough to stay out of his way. This takes continuous hard work on his part and that of the family as a whole.



**(self-proclaimed) Despot Hadiya of Shikaakwa (however short a time that lasted):**

  * Hadiya was a military officer from a family of petty nobility. She’d risen through the ranks quicker than most and was considered one to watch.
  * Her weakness for handsome men was well-known but considered a minor and irrelevant flaw. In other circumstances, it would have been.
  * She was member of the a Stargazers, a small but notorious sect with some odd ideas about the Force. Such as “the Force is an evil intelligence that controls the actions of Force-sensitives, who need to be purged for sentients to truly have free will”.
  * So the Ryo regime’s close ties to Tython, Force-sensitive central, didn’t exactly endear them to her.
  * The Tiger is old and doesn’t care enough to keep the other families happy anymore, the Stallion is a first-rate douchebag who nobody really wants on the throne, the Ox and Hawk (and the Ox’s daughter, for that matter) are Tythonians or may as well be (and would be puppets of the Council if they took the throne, unlikely as that is), that’s practically a succession crisis! (Yes, despite two generations of successors being lined up. Funny how that works.)
  * Hadiya’s personal charisma and military command made her an attractive candidate to replace the Tiger once he was out of the way. From there, it should have been a simple matter of propaganda, bribery, and military action, right?
  * But then her inner Stargazer started to come out, and she started talking about going to war with Tython to wipe the Force menace from the system.
  * This was not a good idea.
  * Meanwhile, the seeming nonentity Ox had gotten desperate enough to call in the Tythonians, and that was the end of Hadiya.



**Phon-Gyi, president of Kalimahr:**

  * She’s married to Lha-Mi (q.v.), after meeting him on a cultural exchange trip when they were young, and didn’t move back to Kalimahr and get into politics until after their kids were grown.
  * As such, she’s been instrumental in maintaining friendly relations with Tython.
  * This causes occasional grumbling but is mostly considered a good thing.
  * Her policies encourage diversity and integration and provide strong protections for minority groups.



**Gharcanna, chief of the Starry Hills tribe of Ska Goran forest wookiees:**

  * He was popular for his independence, forcefulness, and lack of care for what the cities think, but those qualities became less endearing when he nearly started a war.
  * The urbanites tending a nearby section of forest didn’t, as it happened, have any legal claim to the land. So Gharcanna saw an opportunity and sent his warriors in with blasters to go make it part of the tribe’s territory. It got bad.
  * Eventually, as a well-armed neutral party, Tythonian Ranger Léionore Brock was sent in to calm things down and get a treaty worked out. (Rangers are trained and equipped for both fighting and humanitarian aid as well as negotiations; sending her rather than the diplomatic service means they saw at least the potential need for all three and considered the first two more of a priority.)
  * Gharcanna was allowed to remain the chief, but he was gently induced to accept an arranged marriage to Wrrysha, a formidable woman with a more pacifistic bent, and as he ages, the tribe is looking at successors with as little inclination to follow in his footsteps as possible.



**Ensi-Falakh, mayor (if you will) of Isin, Ska Gora:**

  * Ensi-Falakh is a Noghri woman of a certain age, with no spouse or children of her own but a large extended family. She’s become the stern but caring great-aunt to all of Isin, in a way.
  * Most of her youth was spent getting a law degree and then working as a minor functionary in the administration of the Tenth Ward’s previous city council representative. She then ran for the council seat once she was eligible, winning quite handily, then parlayed that into the ensi-ship after about a decade and a half of service.
  * Her policies focus heavily on education and turning out people who can compete for any job in the system.
  * She’s shifted the weight of the justice system from exile towards community service, so that the city’s worst aren’t running around the system free to tarnish the entire planet’s image.



**Orrel Myrr, CEO of the Larean Company, Nox:**

  * Orrel is a Cathar aged about 40, promoted from chief technology officer a few years ago.
  * Her wife is noted actress Veryl Myrr. Quite the power couple.
  * Larean specializes in communications technology, so they do that tech company thing where the pay is quite nice, the benefits and paid leave policies are pretty solid, and the work sites have all the amenities anyone could want.
  * And if it becomes a bit of a gilded cage when things get busy and everyone’s being called on to put in 80-hour workweeks, well, it’s better than the other kind, right?




	29. Communications

Communications are another subject that we’ve mostly kind of vagued in-story. (Canon mostly does the same, aside from a couple of interesting details, so we’re in good company here.)

  * 3D holocalls are the prototypical form of communication; picture and sound quality are quite decent, but there is that pesky blue tinge. It just wouldn’t be the same without it.
  * So bandwidth is patently not an issue. Text- and voice-based systems also exist for when it is, or when holocalls would be inconvenient. (No need to wear pants if they can’t see you.)
  * No hyperspace technology in the Tythos system means no faster-than-light communication, either (the Rakata have it, but they’re not sharing right now). The light-speed delay, even between planets, is less of an issue than you’d think; the planets are crammed pretty close together to all be in Tythos’s habitable zone.
  * The Infinite Empire has a pretty nice data infrastructure, especially since laying cables and erecting transmitters are problems easily solved by their favored “throw a horde of laborers at it” solution.
  * Their comms have multiple layers of complicated, ever-shifting security protocols.
  * Lower-level military officers and petty nobles have been known to be stripped of their command or title for not dressing up fancily enough or doing enough groveling on a holocall with their superior.




	30. Weather

Yes, I know weather isn’t the same thing as climate. Be that as it may, you’ll get a post on climate today and like it. The Tythos system, by planet:

  * Sunspot and Malterra are airless little space-Mercuries (yes, I know), equipment-threateningly hot during the day and barely warmer than the vacuum of space at night.
  * Nox has some terribly unpleasant compounds in its atmosphere, and temperatures are high enough that it’d really be stretching it to call the place habitable per se. You stay in your nice air-conditioned city-dome if you know what’s good for you.
  * Krev Coeur tends toward the warm and sunny. Which works out well enough for the resorts.
  * Tython doesn’t have Force storms in this timeline, which leaves us with an uninterestingly Earth-like range of climates.
  * Kalimahr is temperate, with less extreme temperature variation than Tython.
  * Shikaakwa is a bit chilly—they wear those layers for a reason.
  * Ska Gora’s forests are basically space-taiga, with temperatures rather on the cold side but still livable.
  * The moons of Obri and Mawr are awfully cold, with constant, dangerously high winds on many of them. Long sunless periods when Tythos is eclipsed by their planet don’t help.
  * Furies Gate is frozen, with an atmosphere of sublimating ice. Don’t go outside without a spacesuit.



Well, it looks like this is it. It’s been fun. Again, go read the stories, and I’m sure I’ll be back sooner rather than later for another meta dump.


End file.
